Christmas Truffles Revisited (and not the kind that grow in the woods) December 24, 2010

It’s a Christmas tradition for my three grandchildren and me to bake decorated sugar cookies together. I prepare the dough the night before and have it well chilled when they arrive the next afternoon. Then, each of them armed with a rolling pin or an improvised version of same, we roll, cut out, and sprinkle the cookies to our hearts’ content.

Generally, their mothers, my daughters, look on and expedite the creative process by shuttling trays of tree-, angel-, Santa-, star-, heart-, reindeer-, teddy bear-, stocking- and blob-shaped cookies from our decorating table into and out of the oven. Inevitably in the process, portions of dough are eaten or dropped on the floor, and sometimes both. Consequently, their mothers are generally somewhat reluctant to eat what the grand kids and I bake.

When we’ve finished, our workspace and ourselves look as if we’ve been hit by the remnants of a flour, chocolate sprinkles, and colored-sugar explosion. Louis, Cora and Anna are now eight, eight and six, but we’ve done this since they were much younger, and the younger the children, the exponentially larger the mess.

This year, though, two of these fabulous fellow cookie bakers, Louis and Anna, have moved to Boston with their mom and dad, Mandy and Arnaud, where they are having a wonderful, new kind of Christmas — one that involves a fluffy and pristine blanket of snow, a caring circle of friends, special traditions of service to those in need, and some serious snowball fights! So this year Cora and her mom, Rose, still Dallasites, came over with the idea of executing what I thought was my brilliant innovation: making chocolate Christmas truffles for our family and friends (and ourselves, too, of course.)

I was prepared with recipes copied and printed from the Martha Stewart Living web site for chocolate ganache and truffles. (Pretty much every item I cook during the holidays is a Martha.) I had bought some good quality bittersweet chocolate and some organic cream and gathered together all of the toppings in which we’d roll our lovely and [in my mind] spherical ganache delicacies: cocoa powder, cinnamon, hand-crushed almonds and pecans, powdered sugar, and even some green-tinted sugar and multicolored sprinkles (yes, artificial dyes, but it’s Christmas!)

Cora and her mom arrived, and we made the ganache. Cora is a marvelous kitchen presence, as, like me, she marvels at the changes in ingredients with the application of heat and mixing, which I like to talk about in terms of laywoman’s ‘physics’, trying to incorporate the teensiest academic reference into our process. So we oohed and aahed as Cora poured the bubbling hot cream over the chocolate bits and began to whisk them together, as we watched them began to swirl around and then blend, transforming themselves magically from a liquid and a solid into a glorious, incorporated silky brown goo. Mama Rose pitched in with the whisking.

Then we poured out the ganache carefully into pie plates to cool, as advised by Martha, refrigerated it and went off to run an errand.

But not quite a long-enough errand, it seemed to us later.

When we came home, Cora and I excitedly assembled our truffle-making supplies: white lotus-petaled bowls of my mother’s individually filled with various sugars, cinnamon and cocoa powder. Cora armed herself with the melon baller and me with the coffee scoop. We removed the ganache from the ‘fridge — it looked glossy and solid. Powdering our hands with cocoa powder (per Martha again), Cora carefully broke the surface of the ganache with her scoop and ladled it into her hand in order to form it into a ball and roll it in a topping. Then, slowly but quite unstoppably, the lovely chocolate mixture oozed through her fingers and drizzled itself in streams into a contented puddle on top of the nest of cocoa powder.

“Awwww, mannnn!” we said in unison.

But we were undeterred. Experimenting, Cora figured out that with handfuls of cocoa powder, she could make her ‘truffles’ resemble a melty semi-semi-semi-solid. My process involved ladling scoops of the mixture onto a plate, then sprinkling the liquidy blob with a topping.

When Rose came into the room to see our results, she tried hard to compliment us, but could really only say, “OOooooohhhh… Wow.”

Still, sort of like the quintessential ‘visions of sugarplums’ one hears about, visions of the elegant truffles Cora and I would make, nestle into small boxes I’d collected, and give out to neighbors and friends as Christmas gifts (and, of course, ship off to Boston) had danced in my head for weeks. So after Rose and Cora went home, I surveyed the results of our splendid effort and felt it would just be wrong to go down in defeat. “But I just wanted them to look pretty and round,” I whined to myself.

I re-refrigerated the chocolate blobbies, and, when I looked at them later, the magic of physics had indeed begun to reassert itself. There was a subtle but noticeable change in their surface, from glossy to dull. At last, they seemed to be ‘setting up’, so I gently reshaped them into balls, re-rolled them in their toppings, and laid them gingerly back on their plate in a picturesque pattern: a cinnamon, a white sugar, a cocoa powder, a ground pecan.

And so, if you’re on our Christmas list, beware: you may in fact be receiving Truffles Revisited.

KS

P.S. I just ate one… OK, three. Believe it or not, they’re actually quite good if one doesn’t think too much about the process.

P.P.S. In a wonderful irony, Santa just delivered a gift at my house (don’t know how he did it and kept up his rounds — NORAD has him tracked in Australia around this time) with a gift of Lake Champlain Handmade Organic Truffles from my Boston family! The Lemon Ginger I just ate was yummmm.

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2 Responses to “Christmas Truffles Revisited (and not the kind that grow in the woods)”

Just received this wonderful email from my friend, Lynn, a remarkable woman who has helped give two generations of my family a superb education yet still manages to look as young as my daughters! I hadn’t thought of it this way, being almost entirely focused on the ‘chocolate’ aspect of things…

“What a wonderful Christmas story! Sometimes, on the first try, life (yes,
even at Christmas) just doesn’t turn out the way we envision it and hope it will proceed. And yet, we have the opportunity (if we accept the mission) to “fix” it a little. We can let some of our pre-conceived expectations go and accept and appreciate those seeds of growth we all have within us. It’s still the same goo, but with a different form….Christmas is the season of death and rebirth! BTW, it was also sweetly humorous!